Programme coordinator

Dr Chiara de Cesari

Chiara de Cesari is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on heritage/memory, museums and broader cultural politics and the ways in which these are changed by the effects of globalisation and transnationalism. Her most recent project explores the making of a new European collective memory in relation to its blind spots, such as colonialism, with a particular focus on the associated museum representations.

Dr Mirjam Hoijtink

Mirjam Hoijtink is coordinator of the The East and Europe research group at the University of Amsterdam. Hoijtink’s interests include museum ethics, contested heritage in museums and historical and contemporary exhibition narratives (art, history, anthropology, archaeology). She published on museums of archaeology, Islamic collections and currently works at life-writing and cultural memory production of a series of objects looted during Dutch colonial warfare in Indonesia.  

Prof. Bram Kempers

Bram Kempers is Professor of Sociology of Art in European Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. Kempers publishes and teaches on the subject of museums in the context of government policies, private patronage, architecture and design, management and marketing and the rich history of museums since the Italian Renaissance.

Prof. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes 

Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the UvA. Until 2014 she worked as Professor of Iconology at the University of Ulster, Belfast. Her research focuses on word and image studies, particularly the visual legacies of writers, also considering performance, the historiography of art and curation. Lerm Hayes has curated contemporary art exhibitions for: Goethe Institut, Dublin; Tolstoy Estate, Russia; MoA, Seoul National University, Korea; Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; LCGA, Limerick and CCI, Paris. Her curatorial focus has been on ‘literary art exhibitions’, beginning with Joyce in Art and most recently including Convergence: Literary Art Exhibitions, a meta exhibition.

Dr Ihab Saloul

Ihab Saloul is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Academic Coordinator of Heritage and Memory Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently a NIAS Fellow and a Visiting Professor of Culture and Identity Politics at Freie Universität Berlin. Saloul’s interests include cultural memory, heritage and museums, conflict and identity politics, literary theory and visual analysis, post-colonial theory, migration and diaspora, as well as contemporary culture in Europe and the Middle East. His current research deals with competing memories and the aesthetics of displacement and exile in contemporary Palestinian and Israeli cultural memories.